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Project Gutenberg's The Portion of Labor, by Mary E. Wilkins Freeman This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org Title: The Portion of Labor Author: Mary E. Wilkins Freeman Release Date: March 18, 2006 [EBook #18011] Language: English Character set encoding: ASCII *** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE PORTION OF LABOR *** Produced by Jeff Kaylin and Andrew Sly The Portion of Labor By Mary E. Wilkins Author of "Jerome" "A New England Nun" Etc. Illustrated Harper & Brothers Publishers New York And London MDCCCCI To Henry Mills Alden [Illustration: What did such a good little girl as you be run away from father and mother for?] Chapter I On the west side of Ellen's father's house was a file of Norway spruce-trees, standing with a sharp pointing of dark boughs towards the north, which gave them an air of expectancy of progress. Every morning Ellen, whose bedroom faced that way, looked out with a firm belief that she would see them on the other side of the stone wall, advanced several paces towards their native land. She had no doubt of their ability to do so; their roots, projecting in fibrous sprawls from their trunks, were their feet, and she pictured them advancing with wide trailings, and rustlings as of green draperies, and a loudening of that dreamy cry of theirs which was to her imagination a cry of homesickness reminiscent of their old life in the White north. When Ellen had first heard the name Norway spruce, 'way back in her childhood--so far back, though she was only seven and a half now, that it seemed to her like a memory from another life--she had asked her mother to show her Norway on the map, and her strange convictions concerning the trees had seized her. When her mother said that they had come from that northernmost land of Europe, Ellen, to whose childhood all truth was naked and literal, immediately conceived to herself those veritable trees advancing over the frozen seas around the pole, and down through the vast regions which were painted blue on her map, straight to her father's west yard. There they stood and sang the songs of their own country, with a melancholy sweetness of absence and longing, and were forev
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